Attempting to recapture the magic that made Gladiator an award-winning hit, Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe reteam for the fifth time for Robin Hood, a bloody prequel to the familiar legend. Crowe’s Robin, formally Robin Longstride, is first introduced as an unassuming yet heroic archer in King Richard’s army, who, after the King falls in battle, returns to England and travels to Nottingham to repay a dying knight’s wish. Once there, he and his fledgling band of Merry Men settle down, Robin meets his Marian (Cate Blanchett) and rallies his countrymen in this epic but mostly charmless medieval origin story.

Born out of an understandable desire to add a new chapter to the familiar folk hero’s tale, Robin Hood evolved under screenwriter Brian Helgeland and director Ridley Scott into a more straightforward historical epic, in essence, rebooting the Robin Hood legend. Heavy on backstory and courtly politicking, this is the outlaw archer as you’ve never seen him before, and largely for good reason -- the more familiar story of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is more fun. As it is, Scott and Crowe give us Gladiator in tights, Braveheart with less rousing battle scenes, a grim slog through new plot points but well-traveled historical action movie terrain. By the time the film ends in Sherwood Forest almost two and a half hours later, it feels like things are finally just getting started. There’s something to be said for a fresh take on an old story, but Scott and Helgeland were so dead-set on showing audiences a new Robin Hood that they almost completely overlooked the elements that made the iconic outlaw such an enduring and entertaining figure in the first place.

Despite the great promise of another Scott/Crowe pairing and their respective guy movie pedigrees, Robin Hood is unfortunately little more than a generic historical action movie, with battle scenes that fail to raise the bar and struggle to stand out compared to the gold standards set by Gladiator and Braveheart. Save one or two particularly fine slow motion shots of arrows in flight, they might as well be deleted scenes from Scott’s Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven. Scott’s still capable of directing large-scale action with the best of them, but the glimpses are fleeting here as the skirmishes are clumsily integrated in Helgeland’s convoluted and overstuffed script. For his part, Crowe remains a more than able action hero, despite concerns about his age and expanding waistline. His Maximus redux fits Robin awkwardly, however, as Crowe plays him heavy and joyless, and displays more sexual chemistry with his Merry Men than Blanchett’s Marian. Robin Hood shows flashes of the blood-pumping excitement that guys have come to expect from the two big names, but the rest falls frustratingly short of its potential.